Nine Seconds to Impact: Boy Pointed, Wing Struck Monte Cinto

Aviation Survival Stories · Oct 23, 2026 · 16m

Nine Seconds to Impact: Boy Pointed, Wing Struck Monte Cinto

A chilling gap between two pictures of the same flight: investigators later found the left wing struck Monte Cinto and placed a plaque at the precise impact point amid 27 tons of wreckage and human remains after 27 years - so how did searchers spend the first hours looking at the sea instead of the mountain? What did the final nine seconds reveal about a crew, a controller, and a route no one there had flown before?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events on the approach to Ajaccio Airport on 1 September 1981, how navigation…